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(FMJ) Stanley Kubricks Vietnam | Sept 17, 2008 | New York Times | Francis Clines
STANLEY KUBRICK'S VIETNAM - New York Times
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
Published: June 21, 1987
LEAD: THE REASSURING THING about Stanley Kubrick is that after being deep as
Yahweh in the creation of one movie for the last five years, he emerges gentle
and curious on the seventh day, asking about beer commercials and envying silent
film makers and recalling the pleasures of the Thalia.
THE REASSURING THING about Stanley Kubrick is that after being deep as Yahweh in
the creation of one movie for the last five years, he emerges gentle and curious
on the seventh day, asking about beer commercials and envying silent film makers
and recalling the pleasures of the Thalia.
''Have you seen those Michelob commercials?'' he asks as if they were samizdat,
speaking of the 30-second spots that came uninvited with the Giant football game
videos that his sister sent the eminent director all last winter from New
Jersey. Then, he had no time to spare for watching anything beyond his own work
in progress and a weekly fix of football. ''They're just boy-girl, night-fun,
leading up to pouring the beer, all in 30 seconds, beautifully edited and
photographed. Economy of statement is not something that films are noted for.''
Sunday morning at Pinewood Studios in the London suburbs seems sepulchral in the
empty executive offices, as quiet as Hal's deep-space murder scene in ''2001,''
an awful setting to encounter one of a kind. But Mr. Kubrick arrives rumpled and
lone as the night watchman, offers a simple hello, accepts the fact that he
cannot direct the phone to work properly, and settles down to discuss movies and
imagination and his own new work, much as a carpenter would feel the grain of a
cabinet. It is his newest making, perchance his best or at least another in his
line.
''It starts with being excited by a story and finally it's telling the story on
the screen,'' he says, speaking of the process of directing. ''It goes from the
most wonderful literary atmosphere to desperation. It can be as crude as
standing up and writing on the back of an envelope when someone's just said
something and it's 4 o'clock with the winter sun fading. You've got to shoot it
and you're trying to exploit something that's just come up. It's like a
quarterback calling an automatic play when he sees the defense he's up
against.''
His new movie, ''Full Metal Jacket,'' a story hinged on the trauma of the Tet
offensive in the Vietnam War, is completed and opens in New York on Friday at
neighborhood theaters. Beckton, an old 1930's-gasworks town abandoned on the
Thames, has been destroyed by Mr. Kubrick's technical artists, all fiery and
pocked as Hue, the Vietnamese city of the movie's climax. The 200 palm trees
flown in from Spain to make Vietnam of this sceptered isle have been returned to
peacetime. Out on the downs, the Parris Island cadence counting has ceased along
with all the lurid, ignoble, cynical and sadly mortal motion of characters
directed onto film from the mind of Stanley Kubrick.
The movie is literally only hours old in Mr. Kubrick's finished, perfectionist
version, and far from talking 1980's box office or 1960's jabberwocky about his
personal agony through the nation's Vietnam experience, Mr. Kubrick is
describing being true to the initial emotion that struck him when he first found
this story. That was five years ago amid what is the hardest part of directing,
he says, searching for a good tale that sustains the imagination.
''The sense of the story the first time you read it is the absolutely critical
yardstick. I remember what I felt about the book, I remember what I felt in
writing the script, and then I try to keep that alive in the very inappropriate
circumstances that exist on a film set where you've got a hundred people
standing around and nothing but particular problems, still trying to sustain a
subjective sense of what it is emotionally - as well as what it is that pleases
you.''
Bearded and staring carefully as a question is asked, Mr. Kubrick speaks with
his right hand rubbing his brow, often glancing down, like a man reciting the
confiteor or handicapping the next race.
''That first impression is the most precious thing you've got, you can never
have it again - the yardstick for any judgment that you have as you get deeper
and deeper into the work because making a movie is a process of going into
smaller and smaller detail and finally winding up in the minutiae of how does a
footstep sound on the sound track when you're remixing the film.''
No, he had no craving to make a signature movie about that war, he says. He was
reading the Virginia Kirkus Review, as he usually does, looking for stirring
fiction about something, anything that might promise a stunning translation to
film and he came upon a novel, ''The Short-Timers.'' He read a copy.
''I reread it almost immediately and I thought, 'This is very exciting, I better
think about it for a few days.' But it was immediately apparent that it was a
unique, absolutely wonderful book,'' he says about the novel, written by Gustav
Hasford, an ex-Marine combat correspondent whose offering resembles a memoir of
the pellucid and the ravaged as much as the naked and the dead. The screenplay
is by Mr. Kubrick, Mr. Hasford and Michael Herr, author of ''Dispatches,'' a
memoir of the Vietnam War.
''Full Metal Jacket'' is a reference in military bureaucratese to the rifle
cartridge that is the field ammunition of the basic Marine Corps fighter-killer.
The movie is blue with death and madness but also characteristically balletic at
times with Mr. Kubrick's forensic eye, particularly in the initial boot camp
scenes where men are shaved raw for war. The chorus-type character, Private
Joker, played by Matthew Modine, traverses the war diagonally, encompassing the
propaganda mill of the combat correspondents and the sudden, all-hands combat
duty of the Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese. This is an event that shreds
the jingoistic romance of the war and makes an unlikely killer of Joker.
Whether critics judge the film singularly good or bad - never an easy,
predictable task for them by the director's track record - at a minimum the
movie has been spare and ugly and beautiful by the time its dark sweep is
completed from the Marine Hymn to the singing of M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E as Mr.
Kubrick's Marines stagger beyond the Tet offensive into nowhere and houselights
up.
Mr. Kubrick is such a loner in the film business, not only following the beat of
a different drummer but more likely constructing his own drum, that it can only
be purest coincidence that his movie has emerged now in the industry's sudden
burst of special Vietnam films. It comes close after ''Platoon,'' the well
acclaimed standout that he recently saw and liked very much, he says plainly as
a fan who loved the Thalia's darkness, apparently devoid of professional envy.
Mr. Kubrick shies from talking of what he hopes his movie says; he judges he was
typically dubious and critical of the Vietnam War in its day, but he hardly
seems the zealot-esthete now having his say about it. His worry about war in
conversation is understandably technological from the man who made ''Dr.
Strangelove,'' a doubt that nuclear weapons can ever be eliminated and a concern
that there is too little negotiation to limit the chances of accidental missile
war.
Mr. Kubrick works hermitlike for years on a single picture, searching out a
story, writing a script, producing and directing all the way down to, lately,
the search for good foreign writers, actors and directors who might not spoil
the work for him in the four main movie dubbing markets. His choice of subject
matter for a new film is enough to fascinate buffs who have bounded with him
across 30 eclectic years from ''Paths of Glory'' to ''Spartacus,'' from
''Lolita'' to ''Dr. Strangelove,'' from ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' to ''A
Clockwork Orange,'' from ''Barry Lyndon'' to ''The Shining.''
''I'm happy with the picture,'' he says in this period of pause when he will
catch up on 18 months of missed movies, good and bad, and read as ever with the
hope of finding another story. ''My films have all had varying critical opinion
and it's always been subsequent critical reaction that settles the scores.''
He talks of that more in puzzlement than vindication. ''The only thing I can
think of is that everybody's always expecting the last movie again, and they're
sometimes angry - I mean some critics - often put off because they're expecting
something else.'' He talks of trusting the ''more democratric intelligence'' of
the public, a lesson he particularly learned after ''2001'': ''People who didn't
have the responsibility of having to explain it or formulate clear statements
about it two hours after they saw the film weren't troubled.''
At age 58, Mr. Kubrick has been involved in making movies for 35 years, a
physician's son who became a relative adventurer from the Bronx, dropping from
formal education to become a photographer for Look magazine, then moving to
motion pictures where he has mastered the basic phases from writing to financing
and reigns as a bookish autodidact of unpredictable curiosities. He dislikes Los
Angeles, feels New York is technically limited for film making and so finds
London the place to work and raise his family in satisfying privacy.
''Just keep at it,'' he says of his work habit of plunging into the making of
each film, analyzing each approaching day's move well into the night before,
much like the masters of Mr. Kubrick's beloved avocation, chess. ''Chess is an
analogy - it is a series of steps that you take one at a time and it's balancing
resources against the problem, which in chess is time and in movies is time and
money,'' he says.
Chess is less creative for him but teaches him not to get carried away with
impulsive first ideas. ''I've found over the long period of time which it takes
to make a movie that your own sense of whether you think it's good or bad or how
happy you are at a particular time is very unimportant, that the ideas just come
and sometimes they seem to come out of some place that's got nothing to do with
how you feel.''
Mr. Kubrick talks of movies not as Ahab stalks the whale but as a physicist
might toss and catch Newton's apple.
''I have a feeling that no one has yet really found the way to tell a story to
utilize the greatest potential that films have,'' he says. ''I think the silent
movies come closest to it because they weren't trapped in having to present a
scene which was essentially a stage type of scene; movies consist of little play
scenes.'' He sounds gentle toned, as if he were not discussing the heart of his
existence. ''There's a a gap between the guys who can actually write a story and
someone who can visualize it, and that's a big gap because even the directors
who write, like Woody Allen and Bergman, are very much bound up in the
conventions of the stage.''
As he talks, Mr. Kubrick suddenly puts his envy of the silents on a track
parallel with his curiosity about the 30-second Michelob spots. ''The best TV
commercials create a tremendously vivid sense of a mood, of a complex
presentation of something.''
''Some combination of the two might work,'' Mr. Kubrick says, braiding a fantasy
that seems to twirl somewhere within. ''I have a feeling that no one has begun
to do what a movie could really do.'' His voice has a casual, New York mood, but
his eyes reflect a terrible determination.
The director pictures a grainy old fade-in from the silents and he invents a
title card: ''Joe's cousin, Bill.'' ''And you just see a shot of Bill doing
something,'' he says as a listener lingers wishing that Stanley Kubrick would
flesh out Bill. But Bill ceases to exist, with no time for mourning in the run
of ideas, as Mr. Kubrick lovingly talks of ''economy of structural statement,
the nearest to silent film.'' This is a quality he savored in the Vietnam book
in his first reaction, he recalls, and one that in the film he has sought to
transfer ''quite literally because the dialogue is so almost poetic in its
carved-out, stark quality.''
But this movie is done, and Mr. Kubrick seems not so much depleted or doubting
as waiting for the process to turn in his mind all over again, waiting for a
story. ''It's the most difficult thing,'' he says, ''A good story is a
miraculous discovery.''
Even then he sounds more grateful than plaintive. ''The structure making a movie
imposes on your life when you're doing it again feels like it felt each time
before,'' Mr. Kubrick says, smiling. ''So there is a kind of wonderful
suggestive timelessness about the structure. I'm doing exactly the same as I was
doing when I was 18 and making my first movie. It frees you from any other sense
of time.''
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